Just because a game is on disc doesn't mean it will work in the future
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
On the contrary. It's been a very long process of boiling the frog.
I bought a physical release of Spore in 2008 and the game allowed itself to be installed a couple of times. Few years later I bought a single player RPG game for which I still own the CD but I'm not able to play it because I tied it to an online service and lost my credentials. All the games I own on Steam can be gone in one second and my children probably won't be able to get access to them even if they don't require online accounts, for which very many does.
There's a huge disconnect between online games that require servers to be played on - in which case it's sad but understandable that one day these will be gone and unplayable - and vast majority of games that are single player that still require players to be online and have credentials to some 3rd party applications.
GOG is the only vendor that actually lets you to own your games.
Steam is the only company that play fair with their customers, but I can easily see the future in which Gabe passes out and Tencent buys the company.
> But today, buying a console is an ongoing relationship with the manufacturer every microsecond you play a game.
We are fully aware of that, and that's precisely what we are opposed to.
I can buy an old PS2 with collection of games, plug it to a monitor and have fun with no hassle and without an internet connection. 10 years from now PS5 will be a dead brick, even with a bag full of games.
Xbox and PSN don't have such luxuries AFAIK, after a game is removed from the store you cannot keep downloading and playing them.
PC is the last bastion for gaming freedom, a place to patch your game to use community servers. And for better or worse, piracy and emulation is always an option for the games that have any restrictions
(yes, they are allowing third party publishers to use key-cards, but their first party games are fully on the card)
No. Their policy is:
> This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
And their disclaimer disavows any rights you have to use the software or for it not to become broken.
And they prohibit transferring your account or licenses in any fashion, which means they are at best only going to become void when you pass.
Policy is the internal, non-binding decision they make about how they exercise those powers, which GP comment accurately described.
The discussion on wether you truly own a licensed game is a different thing from what I said.
On GoG you can choose to install every older version they've distributed (though GTA is not on there obviously)
Kind of interesting but I also had a game on GOG that got delisted and had to get a refund because it got removed.
If I own it, can I sell it?
This is part of the appeal of Nintendo consoles - you don't need to connect them to the internet, and they are still terrific for local multiplayer.
If you have another Switch with the game already on it you can even download the game from that Switch using the “match version” feature and then play with the GKC to authorize the license, no internet required.
I disagree. They are using that as an excuse, when in reality they simply desire more control. When Sony releases their sales numbers they never compare physical and digital sales of games that are offering both, but rather compare physical sales to everything digital including DLC and digital-only games to make the percentage of digital sales seem higher. You can't ever get a real comparison when there are options for both. Since it is true that physical sales are declining, they feel that they can do so without significant push back. Disc sales are still significant, and even besides the big companies there are tons of smaller companies that would gladly continue to order discs for indie games, limited editions, collectors, etc.
That said, I think you are quite correct about the "ongoing relationship with the manufacturer". This is just another step in the direction of seizing total control over things that people once considered that they owned.
I remember half life 2 sucked -- you bought a physical game disk in the store... and you had to create a steam account to play it. I thought they were jerks at the time because before that a physical disk was what you needed to play your game.
What they did was set a bad example, and then the floodgates opened for all the rest to pull that nonsense.
Other big companies set bad examples too. All the fashionable but flawed Apple UI designs get copied by everyone else. For example Tesla has a similar iphone/ipad UI in their cars -- but they are moving vehicles and you don't want to be swiping on a screen to defrost your windshield.
I really wish companies would step up and set GOOD examples and follow through.
[1] In November 2004, Half-Life 2 was the first high-profile game to be offered digitally on Steam, requiring installation of the Steam client for retail copies. During this time users faced problems attempting to play; part of legal issues that Valve had with Vivendi, who claimed that physical copies it published could not be activated as to it the game had not been released. The Steam requirement was met with concerns about software ownership and requirements, as well as problems with overloaded servers - demonstrated previously by the Counter-Strike rollout.
I can see where you're coming from, but having recently replayed my childhood copy of MGS, all I can say is don't ask me for Meryl's codec number.
If physical releases actually go away, that dystopia comes to bear. Console publishers think that this is a step in the direction of further control over their library, which is laughable. They're killing the compromise, the other side of which was, "Gamers will mostly respect console DRM and not flood the zone with "Explicitly Fuck You" piracy." These companies are about to learn a hard lesson.
If some secret torrent of piracy is somehow unleashed, they'll just unleash a secret torrent of lobbying to increase penalties and investigation, and a secret torrent of partnerships with and cross-ownership of ISPs to unleash a secret torrent of surveillance.
I'm pretty sure I was the only one who dropped consoles entirely when they told me that the PS3 was going to have to be online. All my PS2 stuff still works, and I bought a couple more to make sure I'd always have parts. Pretty much everybody else liked gaming more than they liked their professed belief systems.
This won't even be an adjustment. Maybe they could give you a cardboard disk with a QR code on it that you can slide into fake little slot, in a very pretty box that says "Collectors Edition" on it. Or a DVD with a single encrypted text file on it that has your license number.
They weren't pirates until now. This is radicalizing hubris.
>If some secret torrent of piracy is somehow unleashed, they'll just unleash a secret torrent of lobbying to increase penalties and investigation, and a secret torrent of partnerships with and cross-ownership of ISPs to unleash a secret torrent of surveillance.
This has never worked. On the contrary, for most of the history of rewriteable media in most of the world, bootlegging has been the norm, and IP owners are powerless to stop it save providing a more convenient alternative.
>Or a DVD with a single encrypted text file on it that has your license number.
This could have been an option before they made their power grab. It's too late now. They've killed the goodwill and "face" that made the prior paradigm digestible, and exposed the strategy to too many people who wouldn't have faced it earlier.
I never understood why I should prefer driving against some punks that spend their evening crashing into the other players on purpose or wait for online races to start.
But anyone is different.
So you don't like Twisted Metal (great PS2 game) or Mario Kart (great game on any Nintendo console)?
Twisted Metal, never heard about it. I was in the soft-simulation games (Gran Turismo, the F1 games, etc) and the stuff like Need For Speed, but I think I have a dozen of games, no more than that.
Your comment is interesting though - I wouldn't expect skill in Gran Turismo (or Forza, or more realistic racing sims, etc.) to translate directly into Mario Kart! I don't expect that F1 drivers would benefit from training using Mario Kart, but they still might enjoy playing it.
https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/48181341/max-verstappen-p...
Rights matter. If we had the same rights with digital purchases we had with old physical games the disc thing would be a much much smaller issue. Would many care outside true collectors?
Don’t confuse the two. If you do, and you complain loudly enough, you’ll get the monkey’s paw version of discs. All the downsides of both, no upside at all.
I'm interested to understand the self-denial and mental gymnastics you're using to make the claim: physically owning something that cannot be taken away from you is just pretending that you physically own something that cannot be taken away from you.
The wedding ring on my finger cannot be taken away from me by the person who made it. It's mine. I can wear it for the next 50 years or I can throw it to a river. Those are my rights as the owner of the physical medium.
There's no pretending happening here.
That's a pretty big assumption. Back in the day I bought a GameCube and decent game collection. I tried it a few months ago and the optical drive is dead, so now my games are just expensive coasters. I could buy another one in the second hand market, but given their age it will also die sooner or later.
That is the problem with proprietary console media, once the hardware inevitably dies, the media itself is useless.
This is definitely a good reason to give up on consumer rights... the hardware might die. No point having rights if things can break anyway, right? /s
Closed platforms like consoles are at the mercy of their manufacturers. If you want consumer rights, stick to open platforms like the PC.
What if the full game isn’t on the disc? How are you going to play it in five years when the servers are gone and you can’t download the rest.
What if the game isn’t on the disc at all? What if it’s basically a magic unlock code and then the whole thing gets downloaded. Like Nintendo’s game key cards.
No one can ever take away your right to stick your disc into the console. And it will always do whatever it did if you did that when the console was not connected to the Internet.
Today you can’t always play the game in that situation. Which means that having the thing in your hand already isn’t good enough.
Digital download makes that fact obvious. People think discs are still in PS1/2 days where they're always enough. Thats gone.
> What if the game isn’t on the disc at all? What if it’s essentially an unlock key and the entire game must be downloaded, like Nintendo’s game-key cards?
That is precisely the issue being debated. People object to games ceasing to be self-contained products and becoming revocable permissions—dependent on a publisher’s servers and continued cooperation. Physical media matters because it can, in principle, preserve a game as something its owner can use repeatedly without requesting permission each time.
Downloads themselves aren’t the problem. I love the extreme convenience of buying a game and playing it within hours without leaving home. It's crazy to me that we can do that today, when just 30 years ago my friend and I were ripping demo discs off of the front of PC Zone magazine. But that model remains acceptable only while platforms such as Steam, reinforced by consumer protections such as those in Australia, preserve a reasonable expectation of continued access to what people have purchased.
What you’re describing is a form of generational amnesia—or shifting-baseline syndrome. If you grow up with ownership steadily being replaced by conditional access, conditional access begins to feel like the natural and inevitable meaning of ownership. It isn’t.
It's the malleability and ephemerality of digital content that has enabled not just restricting people's rights, but destroying the authenticity of media by arbitrarily replacing its content. The reason Amazon could delete 1984 from your Kindle, is its digital nature. Nobody, except you, can delete a book from your shelf or change its content.
> For years now, the testers at DoesItPlay have been documenting this trend, testing thousands of physical game releases to see which ones live up to the promise of full “plug and play” functionality without an Internet connection. Thus far, a full 27 percent of the physical releases they’ve tested require some sort of download to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content that is not stored on the physical release itself. That ratio balloons to 34 percent for tested PS5 games and 50 percent for those on the Xbox Series X.
That example is my case for full, offline, physical copies of a piece of media I can plug and play into my console without an internet connection.
Turning things into big piles of numbers isn't what takes them from you. It's the hardware and ecosystem that limits what you can do with the numbers. The reason Amazon could delete that book isn't that the numbers were particularly deletable somehow, it's that people were using systems that let someone else control them.
And further, see how much effort companies spend on trying to prevent people from putting games onto computers like that and using emulation to play them. There's a pretty solid argument that copying games from older physical media like that to purely digital copies actually preserves them, because it's a lot harder for someone to construct a bunch of mechanically functional SNES consoles than it is to distribute copies of an emulator.
The point is you have no rights digital or physical. That’s the problem.
Disc are not magic totems. There is nothing promising you the disc you will work in 10 years, 10 months, 10 days. Nothing ensuring that you can resell it for >$0. They could trivially make the disc hold a one-time redemption for the game.
If you buy a physical used copy of Anthem can you play it? Nope. They could do that with single player games.
What’s the resale value of, effectively, a coaster? Can you lend it to a friend? Your current rights are about the coaster. Not the software.
You happen to have abilities with physical discs because of tradition. You’re not guaranteed those. Digital makes that obvious.
This is a rights issue.
I think the funniest thing about all of this to me is that we're literally talking about the company that put rootkits on their CDs to try to stop the content from being used in a way they didn't like. They might literally have the worst track record in history when it comes to predatory consumer behavior related to discs, and people are trying to get them to keep making them.
Different divisions of a mega corp.
We know divisions fight. The hardware business had to make MiniDisc worse so Sony Music wouldn’t be too mad.
So if I get tired of my DVD movie collection, I could sell it or give it to my kids. If I ever decide I'm too old for the retro game cartridges I have, they could go to future grandkids. But my GOG games or Bandcamp music is stuck with me forever (legally speaking). Nobody would know if I "gave" them to my kids, but there certainly is no way to resell them.
Now this is still a rights issue, but physical media makes this easy (outside of keys/DRM as you point out) You always have the right to hand on a physical object.
The point that I read the parent commenter as making is that if the loud outcry in favor of discs go so loud that they were forced to spend effort with continued manufacturing of physical discs, it seems like a pretty reasonable assumption they might try to do something like what I described, because at least they get some of what they're trying to go for with the digital-only strategy even if it's not all of it. Focusing on the discs themselves is a distraction from the actual issue.
Discs are accidental theater. They didn’t start out that way but that’s what they’ve become.
So disc or not doesn't really matter.
A disc is not sufficient. It does not give you the rights you think.
However for games with a real single player component, or ONLY a single player component, there’s no excuse other than they can.
It doesn't have to be a disc. It almost certainly does need to be physical.
Despite whatever rights you might have now or in the future they can just hand wave all that away with update to TOS. Sure, technically speaking it might not enforceable but realistically who is going to sue? Even class action lawsuits have very little teeth because the penalties are in the region of lunch money/pocket change. Now if Sony executives went to prison for a few months after each lawsuit that might encourage some behavior changes. Monetary penalties though? It's just the cost of doing business for them. And even if you do win, do you get to keep your account? Doubt it. Good luck trying to prove in court that you were shut down in retribution since it is their platform they can and will cut you off at their convenience. That's the contract you signed when you accepted those terms of service and there is no consumer law to protect you since it is their platform.
With discs there is no middle-man and physical things have longer-standing legal precedence when it comes to protections so it is the path of least resistance for preservation of rights. Average consumer has no lobbying power to write entire new laws over digital goods and whatever gets written is reflective of what is currently in place and right now the people writing these laws are on the level of competence that they read their email from printed out paper: a physical format. Fighting for physical makes sense because the people involved with enforcing that protection understand that format better than digital.
I'm not sure how easy it will be to copy downloaded games to another PS3 once Sony pulls the plug on the PSN store (and likely PSN login) for PS3 next year.
Most of the listed games seem to be playable but with some content locked behind DRM, galaxy, or online connectivity.
Overall it does seem like they are trying to live up to their DRM-free claim/promise, but it looks like there are still a few annoying exceptions.
Edit: looks like a couple of my games that had issues have been patched, nice. Thanks for that link.
For example, if there was a law that the entire source code (including server code) should be immediately put into public domain if the game maker is unable to meet their obligation of serving up the game due to liquidation, then the release of the source code would be a legally sanctioned part of the liquidation process.
And the notion of a law requiring source code to be released in the public domain is so stupid. The source code is an asset which can potentially be sold to benefit creditors. And often the source code contains IP owned by third parties who wouldn't allow a release anyway.
All it takes is for young people to decide that they actually don't think they should have to pay a subscription to e.g. listen to music that came out when their dead great grandparents were kids or that they should have no rights to own anything ever.
The same people whose student loans couldn't be discharged in bankruptcy could I'm sure consider the idea that companies' obligations to them can't be either.
e.g. I had old appliances that came with circuit diagrams. We could mandate by law that any device for sale must provide diagrams/schematics, BOM, and supplier contact information, any programmable device must provide source code and must not interfere with the owner loading their own code (basically GPL3 by law), etc. This all falls under the umbrella of strong right to repair/property rights, and in an AI world, it makes complete sense to do it. The cost of producing the "IP" will trend toward zero, so why would we protect it over the owner's rights? Likewise, with climate change and environmental destruction as the top issue in the world for our children, we should be mandating strong repairability criteria and strongly disincentivizing consumerism.
For media/entertainment, even today, you can realize that our problem is already one of curation by considering what the world would be like with ~20 year copyright (or if you're just willing to pirate). 10s of millions of books, 10s of millions of songs, 10s of thousands of games. There's already more media than anyone could approach taking in. Even sticking to the best 0.1% (whatever that is) would fill a lifetime. There's simply no reason to continue this nonsense.
The media and entertainment industry is relatively small and unimportant. If you occasionally lose access to some games / songs / movies it doesn't matter.
The media industry is unimportant, which is why we should repeal their laws that gave them over a lifetime of monopoly status on our culture and heritage.
The problem with Sony killing physical games (and the wider culture of digital purchases) is, unfortunately, a long-term one. Nobody will be seriously affected right now, as long as Sony's update servers are up and both digital and physical are supported. But 10, 20 years from now, both from a game preservation standpoint and from a consumer protection standpoint, this will be disastrous, when many games will still be charging outrageous prices (without the soft check of reselling/trading) or even no longer exist.
(Splatoon Raiders was released a week ago so I don't think that's a good example to use for games without updates. Even it has an update already, albeit a non-critical one)
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1CEABCBrPv1tWf89h...
...I don't really see why. The question isn't whether a game has updates available, it's whether the un-updated version feels like a complete experience vs a compromised one.
I'm not sure how to read the spreadsheet in that context.
Exactly -- a game released a week ago is unlikely to have updates that could make it feel like a compromised experience.
Take, say, Terraria. I had a blast playing it ten years ago, despite having a fraction of the content and polish it does now. Nonetheless, if that version was all I had access to today, it would feel like a compromised experience.
Updates matter significantly more for some games than others. Sandbox games like Terraria and Minecraft often lie at one end, while at the other end you'll often find first-party Nintendo games, which typically receive a handful of bug fixes at most. Of course, how much playing a 'lesser' version bothers you personally varies greatly too.
The spreadsheet just shows which games have fully updated versions available on cartridge.
Now, Terraria received much more significant updates. I think a game like Terraria is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of physical games.
One that affected me personally was in Pokemon XY, where if you saved in the wrong spot it would corrupt your entire save. As a kid it was a pretty memorable experience to lose ~20 hours of playtime on my Christmas present because I assumed the updates weren't important. Granted, day-one bugs that major in first party Nintendo games are rare, but it's not a given that they're irrelevant either. It can go either way.
The only option for a banned Switch Lite is installing a modchip (there are people who will do it for you for a fee, well worth it imo).
1. Recognize that paying for a game implies ownership. Developers must not employ methods that remove purchased games from online stores or become otherwise unplayable.
2. Recognize the legality of cracking games to make them playable.
To put it in the classic anti-piracy "You wouldn't steal a car, would you?" terminology, we need to tell developers, "No, you can't sell us a car and then steal it. Yes, we have the right to built tools to take it back if you try."
Valve and Steam Works games happily sold literal trash that were useless to anyone but the first person who redeemed the key. They destroyed the second hand PC market selling codes in a box with potential time saver installers. And they still needed online activation.
I too bought a Steam Deck and haven't looked back. It's still a normal computer even if Steam itself goes to shit, but all signs point to it steadfastly refusing to do that. Here's to hoping Gaben never dies.
You could, at least hypothetically, put every physical cartridge in a Switch or Switch 2 and download all the updates to those games, and just have an offline mirror of Nintendo's entire update CDN. More likely someone should make a homebrew app that archives update data by using this weird peer-to-peer update protocol, but I have no idea what encryption would need to be broken to make that work. But it would be a legitimate boon to game preservation to have something where someone with a bone-stock Switch and a game can just download the update they need and be done with it.
How's that going to work out today or in newer generations?
Well at least steam ones.
It's so easy for DRM'd games to become lost forever as the rights transfer around, and the hosting or support costs stop being worth it for publishers.
the disks themselves are largely a relic already, not enough storage for some games... and I don't recall a game I've played recently that didn't require a download on first play
it would be nice to have some regulation that at least requires games to have some sort of labelling that indicates a minimum length of support for online functionality requirements
Thank god we figured out the encryption on Rock Band content. Everything there is preserved now.
This has happened to other media, and it was inevitable that it would happen to games. What eras of movies or music do you think of when you consider those collections? Why would gaming be different?